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2013 Music Highlights

Following up on my 2013 movie highlights, now the year’s soundtrack. This year was an absolutely fantastic one for music. I don’t keep a music log, but if you’ve been at an ECCC race this year you’ve heard—and danced to!—many or all of these.

Some college station in State College, PA was playing the full ~40 minute album mix collection of this via Ministry of Sound while we were setting up bootleg camp way up near the firetower in Rothrock one night, incredible…

The video doesn’t fit the song well in my mind, but it’s interesting and well done. Pretty awesomely, and correctly, listeners on a local radio station voted these guys the top of both the station’s 2013 “Best of” and “Should Give It A Rest” lists.

The Beats

Now the best of the best music for 2013.

Leila Moss:Here’s My Boy
The backstory of this is actually fascinating: This is just a random open mic-ish live recording of a song from Beck’s Song Reader experiment, a collection of sheet music from which many many people have posted a wide variety of interpretations of the different songs. Beck himself, as far as I know, hasn’t put out any recordings of the music, so they’re all over the place. It’s a really neat project in creativity, music—particularly folk music—and publishing, taking a classic form of content dissemination and bringing it into the new age with YouTube videos plus a custom web portal, and so on. All that aside though, I just really like this recording.

Rihanna:Stay
Despite ridiculous airtime I don’t think this ever managed to get old. Whatever else may be true of her—and her music’s by and large great—this year I think Rihanna did quite a bit to expand her genre range and style.

Break and Die:Slow Down
This was released in 2010 but it just came across my radar and is incredible. Sadly there’s no actual video as far as I can tell. If you were going to make a music video of bicycle racing or extreme MTB riding, this would be my current untapped leading contender.

Avicii:Wake Me Up
Obviously Levels is still getting a ton of sample time in current songs (that link’s the Skrillex mix), and I remain an absolutely huge fan of My Feelings For You (Original Mix), but Wake Me Up is a whole other thing. Sure, it’s gotten a ton of airtime, but under the catchy beats I think it has a lot of poetry about growing up.

Kavinsky:First Blood, Protovision, Roadgame, and Nightcall
Some of these songs have been out before, but the new collected album OutRun is amazing. Highlights include the above, but the overall concept and some of the songs like Pacific Coast Highway that work best within that framework are also noteworthy. Seriously—Kavinsky’s an ’80s videogamer, Converse-wearing, varsity jacket toting, Michael J Fox teen punk, throwback dude who died in a fiery Highway 101 car crash, was existentially merged with his now-daemonic Testarossa, and comes back as an undead badass to… Fight the law, kill dudes, save his girlfriend, and lay down phat beats, all possibly within the context of a videogame universe itself?! And there’s both multiple albums exploring this theme and, in an incredibly recursive meta move, a videogame?!?! Take my money, damnit, take it! Take it all!